The Guilt Bag

This is something every English teacher knows about.

It proves that there are simply just not enough minutes in the day.

I have a guilt bag. It's the bag that I take to work, put papers in, and hope that I'll get a few moments here or there to grade. (Insert laughter because it never happens). Every day I bring this bag from my classroom to my car - car to house - house to car - car to classroom. Secretly hoping that someone has graded those papers in the night. To my shock and surprise Santa has yet to show up and grade my papers.

I have to force myself to grade. It really is one of the hardest parts of my job. I have plenty of rubrics and forms to make sure that I am being equitable when grading. But it pains me to see a kid who worked so hard on something just well... stink as a writer.

This is why homework is important. I give homework so that there is some kind of buffer in the system to help the kid who isn't good at writing essays. If a student does all of their work - and puts their best effort in, they will almost always* get a C or better in my class.

So the battle of grading continues - it's a three day weekend. To be honest I have around 40 full essays and 100+ shorter pieces (two paragraphs) that I need to grade this weekend. Partly because back to school night is on the 13th and I don't want to deal with angry parents.

I've already gotten an email about how I need to reconsider their child's grade. I was tired when I was putting grades in and looked at the wrong column when I put grades in so it looked like half the class was failing. No matter how I phrased the email I still felt like I was a complete moron.

Thank goodness there are still 2 and a half days left of this weekend! Now I'm going to go make a cake in my new pampared chef bake-ware - that grading can wait a little while longer.

*It has happened on a rare occasion that the child gets a D ~ but I don't think they have ever failed.

Email oops

Today a random child walked into my room during class and so I turned when there was a break in reading (We are reading The Great Gatsby right now mmmmm Gatsby). I turned to the child and asked what he needed.

M: Hi Mrs. Parsons - Did you get a funny email from me
Me: Yes M I did - but I didn't have time to read it yet.
M: Don't open it
Me: What do you mean?
M: Someone hacked into my email account and sent inappropriate messages to all of my teachers and my future college coach.
Me: *with a slightly nervous laugh* ohhh that's not good
M: No - It's really not - and I'm really upset.
Me: Good luck figuring out who would do this... your college coach, man that stinks.
M: yup, I'm kinda freaking out - you can open the apology email that I sent - there is nothing inappropriate in there. Okay I have to go figure out who else to apologize to. Have a good day.
Me: Bye!

Poor kid. I can't even imagine how much that would stink!